Gertrude Ehrlich

Gertrude Ehrlich (born January 7, 1923) is an Austrian-American mathematician, specializing in abstract algebra and algebraic number theory. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park.[1]

Early life and education

Ehrlich was born on January 7, 1923, in Vienna,[2] the daughter of Jewish lawyer Josef Ehrlich and his wife Charlotte, née Kobak.[3] In the late 1930s, she became a student at the Chajes Gymnasium, a special high school in Vienna for Jewish honor students; her classmates included future Nobel laureate Walter Kohn and mathematicians Rodolfo Permutti and Karl Greger.[4] She was able to escape Nazi-occupied Austria in 1939, traveling with her mother, her older sister Margarete Ehrlich (a philosophy student and later radiographer) and aunt Mathilde Ehrlich (a painter) to the US on the SS Statendam in July 1939; her father rejoined them a year later. They lived for the next several years with her uncle Benedict Kobak in Atlanta.[3] She became a US citizen in 1945.[5]

She graduated from the Georgia State College for Women in 1943, and earned a master's degree from the University of North Carolina in 1945.[2] She completed her Ph.D. in 1953 at the University of Tennessee. Her dissertation, The Structure of Continuous Rings, was supervised by Wallace Givens.[6][7]

Contributions

Ehrlich is the author of the book Fundamental Concepts of Abstract Algebra (PWS-Kent Publishing, 1991; Dover, 2011).[8] She is the coauthor of The Structure of the Real Number System (with Leon Warren Cohen, D. Van Nostrand, 1963)[9] and of Algebra (with Jacob Goldhaber, Macmillan, 1970; Robert E. Krieger Publishing, 1980).[10]

In 1964 she became editor of the "Classroom Notes" department of The American Mathematical Monthly.[11] She was the first organizer of the University of Maryland High School Mathematics Competition, held annually for high school students in Maryland and the District of Columbia, starting in 1979.[12]

The concept of a morphic group comes from a 1976 research paper of Ehrlich, "Units and one-sided units in regular rings", in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society,[13] and Ehrlich's theorem on the endomorphisms of morphic groups, from the same paper, is named for her.[14]

References
  1. "Ehrlich, Gertrude, Prof Emerita", Directory, University of Maryland Department of Mathematics, retrieved 2021-03-27
  2. Murray, Margaret A. M., "Gertrude Ehrlich, Tennessee 1953", Women Becoming Mathematicians: American women mathematics PhDs 1940–1959, retrieved 2021-03-27
  3. "Margarete Ehrlich", Memorial Book for the Victims of National Socialism at the University of Vienna in 1938, University of Vienna, retrieved 2021-03-27
  4. Neuhaus, Herbert (2003), "A class with class", in Scheffler, Matthias; Weinberger, Peter (eds.), Walter Kohn: Personal Stories and Anecdotes Told by Friends and Collaborators, Springer, pp. 173–174, ISBN 9783540008057
  5. "Ehrlich, Gertrude", Katalog (in German), German National Library, retrieved 2021-03-27
  6. Gertrude Ehrlich at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  7. Review of The Structure of Continuous Rings: Israel Halperin, MR0062117
  8. Review of Fundamental Concepts of Abstract Algebra: Allen Stenger, MAA Reviews,
  9. Reviews of The Structure of the Real Number System: H. G. Anderson, Proc. Edinburgh Math. Soc., doi:10.1017/S001309150001155X; Krister Segerberg, J. Symbolic Logic, doi:10.2307/2270860, JSTOR 2270860
  10. Reviews of Algebra: J. O. Kiltinen, Amer. Math. Monthly, doi:10.2307/2978111, JSTOR 2978111; R. E. MacRae, MR0256803; B. F. Wyman, Amer. Math. Monthly, doi:10.2307/2318043, JSTOR 2318043
  11. May, Kenneth O., ed. (1972), "Departmental Editors of the Monthly: 1916-1965", The Mathematical Association of America: Its First Fifty Years (PDF), Mathematical Association of America, pp. 135–137
  12. The University of Maryland High School Mathematics Competition, University of Maryland Department of Mathematics, retrieved 2021-03-27
  13. Li, Yuanlin; Nicholson, W. K.; Zan, Libo (2010), "Morphic groups", Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra, 214 (10): 1827–1834, doi:10.1016/j.jpaa.2009.12.026, MR 2608111
  14. Li, Yuanlin; Nicholson, W. K. (2010), "Ehrlich's theorem for groups", Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society, 81 (2): 304–309, doi:10.1017/S000497270900094X, MR 2609111
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